SOM
Biden appointee Marcella Nunez-Smith at work at Yale.
It’s official: New Haven will have Joe Biden’s ear as he crafts a Covid-19 policy, thanks to the appointment of Yale’s Marcella Nunez-Smith to co-chair the president-elect’s coronavirus advisory board.
Biden’s transition team announced the composition of the board on Monday. Nunez-Smith, an associate professor at Yale School of Medicine, is one of its three co-chairs.
A former Yale School of Medicine dean, David Kessler, who once ran the Food and Drug Administration, is one of the other co-chairs. The third is former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.
Read the transition team’s release, with the full composition of the board, here.
Biden has vowed to addressing the pandemic his first top order of business.
Nunez-Smith’s specialty has been inequities in health care. She spoke about that work recently in this interview with the Yale School of Management’s Ben Mattison. (She also spoke in the above interview in Junewith WNHH program host Tom Ficklin, and again in September, in the video at the bottom of this article.)
“We need equitable access to high-quality healthcare. And every word in that sentence matters,” she said in the SOM interview.
“The disproportionate representation of brown and Black people in those low-wage, frontline jobs that were deemed essential during the pandemic — that’s a structural reality. … We have a segregated, separate and not equal, educational system in this country.
“When we talk about pre-existing conditions and COVID, there’s one narrative that says, ‘Oh, you have folks who are making bad choices with their diet and they’re not exercising,’ but there’s never a mention of the fact that they’re living in neighborhoods exposed to environmental toxins. We don’t speak to this. We don’t speak to the fact that people live, not just in food deserts, but often in food swamps. I went blueberry picking yesterday. My kids have lots of fresh produce to eat. What does it mean to live somewhere where it takes you three buses and a train to get to somewhere that sells skim milk, or a fresh leafy green? …
“If you don’t have a grocery store, you don’t have choice.
“If I had that magic wand right now, it’s about equitable access to high-quality healthcare and equitable access to opportunity.”
Nunez-Smith wears many hats at the medical school. Among her roles: associate professor of medicine and of epidemiology (focusing on chronic diseases); a faculty representative to the Council of Faculty and Academic Societies; co-chair of the medical school’s Steering Committee on Community Projects; academic advisor to med students; director of the Center for Community Engagement and Health Equity; founding director of the medical school’s Equity Research and Innovation Center; director of the Center for Research Engagement. That’s only a partial list; read more about her work here.
Click here to read an Independent story about work she did along with other medical school docs and the NAACP on local efforts to explore the pandemic’s impact on the Black community.
Babz Rawls-Ivy and her guests on Monday’s edition of WNHH FM’s “Love Babz Love Talk” program, including Greater New Haven NAACP President Doris Dumas, applauded Nunez-Smith’s appointment. They said it reflected that the in coming administration intends to take more seriously a pandemic that has hit communities of color particularly hard, and that New Haven will have the new administration’s ear.
Yale
Marcella Nunez-Smith.
Thet should have pick this sister also for the National Coronavirus Task Force?
In the South Bronx, Dr Melissa Barber battles COVID-19, putting into practice the lessons she learned in Cuba, at the Latin American School of Medicine.
"Dr. Barber has identified the most vulnerable in the neighborhood."
The United States has not been able to control COVID-19. The Donald Trump administration did not react in time, played down the reality, and as a result more than 34,000 people have died. Yet the government finds time to attack Cuba.Never forgetting what she learned in Cuba, Dr. Barber stated, "Cuba, like few countries in the world, understands that a person's medical care does not begin with the ambulance ride, but in the neighborhood." She treats each neighbor as she did during his years as a student in Cuba and has identified the most vulnerable in the neighborhood, one of the poorest in New York. "That includes the elderly, people who have infants and small children, homebound people, people with multiple morbidities and are really susceptible to a virus like this one," she said.
​​​​​​​Cuban-Trained Doctor Fights Pandemic in The Bronx.
https://blackagendareport.com/cuban-trained-doctor-fights-pandemic-bronx